The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico too. Such a decision would be in the hands of the PR govt, PUC, any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of PR.

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And his “slight omissions” of material information to Tesla shareholders would have landed someone with less political connections in prison. At the very least, another company committing the same omission of facts would have been barred from issuing ANOTHER $1.5 billion in new debt to securities markets.

Everyone is missing the bigger picture.
We simply​ need to BELIEVE strongly enough, without doubt or reservation, and our dreams will come true……with enough government backing, that is.
We all tend to be so small minded.
Soon we will be able to sit in our semi-comfortable cubical size efficiency “home” viewing infinite amounts of government approved politically corrected content on our robotic Chinese manufactured device while our productive quotient is being met by wholly corporate owned “assets” that assure us they only exist to serve us.
Benevolent caring ownership….aka. Utopia.
What could possibly go wrong…..short of possibly​ the battery on my phone catching fire??

30,000 homes is all there is in South Australia?
Nice to see that the savior didn’t forget to ask for government subsidy.
The same thing could have been achieved by cheap lead acid batteries a century ago, but we had to wait for expensive lithium batteries from a self-proclaimed genius to make it happen. People deserve what they get.

30,000 homes and no industry. Try running a single magnesium smelter off of that battery pack, and see how long you’ll have power.

Solar with battery backup, is a good way to power homes. At least in climates like Puerto Rico and South Africa. Not because it is the cheapest nor most efficient way to do so, but because being self sufficient in energy renders people less dependent on big government and their cronies at big utility companies.

But for a home to be self sufficient in energy, it needs to be built to some semblance of a standard. Rather than the junkpile shacks that are being passed off as “million dollar” houses in our current credit and zoning dystopias; where the whole goal is to ensure people go as deeply in debt as possible, for as little house as possible. With the difference going into the pockets of well connected, utterly useless, purely rent seeking leeches and their enablers in government.

Batteries can be charged with electricity from solar panels, duh!
Considering how expensive it was to run the old and antiquated power grid, solar panels can’t work out worse than that. PR having lots of sunshine and wind too, it makes perfect sense to use them instead of expensive imported fuel.
This is is about not wasting a good crisis, and rebuilding better than before.

Exactly! Everyone seems to be forgetting that Mush owns a solar power company also and that he is now also selling solar panels in the form of rooftop tiles. And what is one major thing that PR is missing right now? Roofs!

So Musk is probably planning to sell his rooftop tiles to PR citizens and businesses for solar power as they rebuild and include one of his batteries in every home, all at a discounted price.

They can’t afford solar power. They have to fix their basic conventional power supply and grid first since solar requires virtually 100% backup (that’s why it’s unaffordable) since sun comes and goes. Oh, and forget batteries. They are outrageously expensive and would be in addition to very expensive solar panels.

Solar is not a bad choice for replacement maybe, but the idea that Tesla has some new edge to it all is not correct. OPZ batteries of similar capacity cost @ same and are reliable and durable, the rest of the system is standard solar installation, inverters etc.

So what he is trying to sell are li-on batteries for their… lack of occasional maintenance? Because they have a smart housing?

From experience…for lead acid you just need to check water level every few weeks and maybe have an alarm/auto cut-off to not over-discharge them. Very rarely a clean and push an equalize button. You can mess with the voltage slightly for temperature, or have auto for that, or not bother even. Sounds easy, right? Over the space of years you can forget easily though… the sort of simple tasks that get overlooked.

I don’t know about professional arrays, but smaller domestic ones you just unscrew…one more thing to do. Hail I don’t know what solutions exist… must be some for areas where it rains golf balls, plastic sheet above?

Anyway, if you line up the panels correctly they act as spoilers for delicate garden plants in very strong winds, and in hurricanes as launch ramps for wildlife trying to find shelter 😉 .

i Have a slightly more practical solution. Run a long extension cord from MIAMI. PR just needs a conventional power grid constructed with current technologies . But just like the old power infrastructure they must keep it maintained .

Hmmm! In South Australia, the plan is for nearly 3 square miles of batteries. Good thing that land is cheap in South Australia. They will be able to provide power for about an hour.

In Fairbanks, Alaska, there is reportedly a battery farm the size of a football field to deal with grid interruptions. It can power the city for about 10 minutes.

If batteries could be made cheaply enough (including the recycling cost), they would be very useful adjuncts to nuclear power plants — by taking care of diurnal variation in demand while allowing the nuke to run steadily at its most efficient rate.

I go to Costco and see big kiosks full of disposable batteries and wonder….does everyone who buys them also then dispose of them in a hazardous site?
Sure they do.
And now we have lots of BIG batteries and more powerful and TOXIC batteries that can spontaneously catch fire, and our savior geniuses are building millions of them. Are we going to end up with old decommissioned oil tankers and cargo ships loaded with these things floating around in hopes of accidental sinking in some off the map place? Or just in our landfills draining into our water sources.
YUM!

Only a progressive could be so singularly retarded, as to believe centralized battery storage for an entire city grid is the right way to deploy a scarce, expensive resource.

Batteries are VERY useful backup devices at endpoints. Where end users see their cost,, and make decisions about exactly which pieces of power hungry equipment needs what level of protection, taking battery cost into consideration. Like a hospital backing up their ventilators, but not the Tesla Supercharger in some self absorbed surgeon’s reserved parking spot.

The “back up the grid” non-solution is the equivalent of not making any such prioritization. Despite one of the most salient features of batteries versus traditional means of storing power, is that their efficiency does NOT increase supralineraly beyond a fairly modest size.

So 100 batteries and 100 solar panels, 1 of each in each of 100 houses, are no less efficient, than one 100x size battery and one 100x solar panel sitting in a field somewhere. Which is critically different from, say, nuclear power plants, where economies of scale render highly distributed generation and provision prohibitively inefficient.

Actually cheaper to have pv off grid… saves on grid costs…more reliable for not using grid also… a few backup components ( which are rarely if ever needed). I suppose the only point is that you cannot greatly over consume own domestic supply for a long period, but correct sizing usually gives slightly more than needed anyway….have to do a full realistic calculation first is all.

Elon Musk is building Tesla Model 3’s by hand, which is why output was only ~400 out of the 1500 he promised.

When he isn’t delaying the Model 3, he is supposedly reinventing maglev trains, space travel, solar panels, and machines that go “ding!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available.

So far, the machines that go “ding!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available is the only thing that works as advertised. Elon Musk’s copy of course goes “ka ching!!!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available.

Puerto Rico’s power grid was systematically neglected for decades. Its NOT a hurricane problem, its another failed socialist economy.

Color me unimpressed that Elon Musk thinks he can weasel more taxpayer subsidies out of this

It doesn’t change the fact that Tesla is not a real car company, its ONLY a tool to collect taxpayer subsidies.

Even the niche “super car” manufacturers (Ferrari etc) produce a profit (or loss) on their own merits, not off taxpayer subsidies. Tesla would not exist but for taxpayer subsidies.

And I doubt EV will be much of a thing outside of gated communities — where tricked out golf carts already dominate (and cost half of what con-man Musk projects his model 3 will cost if it ever gets going).

Anybody who is driving a Tesla is definitely not poor. Sure the model x and model 3 people are wannabes that tell the world how much they want to be part of the upper strata but don’t quite have the financial strength to do it. But they usually have enough cash to try out these new toys.

The landlord in Seinfeld captures the Tesla driver’s way of thinking, IMO.

Dude. You’re welcome to your beliefs but my belief is that you’re hanging out at the wrong blog.

Statists don’t tend to fare too well here. Government directed ‘investments’ are sheer lunacy – the free market is more than capable of working out what is needed and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t.

The moment renewables are economically viable the free market will be all over them like a rash. In the meanwhile, torching tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to ‘bring the future forward’ is an idea suited to the utterly demented and progtards.

Each member of “society” needs to subsidize whatever he feels like. Instead of having others rob them and their kids, to hand money to their favorite guru and illusionist.

Nothing wrong with Musk. He acts the way all billionaires should act: Go for long shots. Any old destitute can get behind and back things that makes sense, as the risk of loss is something he can afford to bear. When you’ve got billions, you darned well should go for moonshots that’s too risky for the rest, as you can afford to cover the inevitable 10 misses for every hit.

But forcing regular people just trying to make ends meet, to partake in the gambling, is never a good thing. No forcing of people ever is.

Society needs lots of stuff. And has limited resources available to fulfill those needs.

Formally, “society” has no needs. Only sentient actors do. Meaning individual people. To the extent “society” can be said to have any needs, those needs are only a simple aggregate of the needs of the individuals comprising said society.

Every one of of those individuals have needs that are unique to them, at a given point in time. And each also has unique to them resources at their disposal, with which to meet those needs. Leading to each of them deciding how much of their limited resources to spend on each need, whether food, science or bingo, will lead to the best possibly outcome for each of them overall.

Not some dudes, who happen to be better armed than the rest, claiming all of you people “need” “Science” (which in practice means, all of you need to give me your money, so I can hand it to my buddy who calls himself a scientist), never mind that your firstborn is two minutes away from outright starvation, resulting from you lacking funds to feed him…..

I’m tired of all the nonsensical and cynical comments.
Renewables are the future, and some of them are viable already. The price of solar panels are dropping like a stone, and wind power is gaining traction too. Natgas or nuclear is the best backup.

One reason the price of solar has come down because the Chinese suppliers of refined silicon don’t bother treating the waste (which is an energy intensive process). Instead, they dump the waste silicon tetrachloride around the plant, poising the land.

We can always count on Elon Musk to find some new way to get on the front page of the news and razzle-dazzle us on any given day with some bold project.

It should be noted that Musk appears Teflon coated and he has suffered little fallout from promises and deadlines unkept, failure simply does not stick but seems to run off his back. The article below delves into his many projects and the hype surrounding him as he keeps a great many balls in the air.

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